With snail porridge and salmon poached in liquorice on the menu, dinner at Heston Blumenthal's Fat Duck might not be for everyone. But despite the economic gloom the phones at the triple Michelin-starred restaurant are ringing red hot.

Blumenthal said the Berkshire restaurant was bombarded with more than 30,000 calls a day as adventurous diners queued up to try his particular brand of "molecular gastronomy", which has given birth to experimental dishes such as egg and bacon ice-cream.

The self-taught chef said demand for tables at the restaurant in Bray had continued to rise despite a food poisoning incident two years ago – thought to have been caused by contaminated oysters – that made more than 500 diners ill.

"It has just been going up and up," said Blumenthal, who said calls were coming from as far afield as Australia thanks to the exposure of his cooking programmes. "It was an awful time but when we reopened the response was fantastic."

The Fat Duck employs three full-time receptionists but its computer system logs the number of calls that fail to get through each day. That figure, he says, is between 28,000 and 31,000, double the figure 18 months ago, although the chef concedes the total number is swollen by prospective diners hitting the redial button. The restaurant only takes bookings two months ahead of time.

But with two sittings a day and only 42 seats up for grabs, space is at a premium. He said for many of his customers it might be a "once-in-a-lifetime" visit. The tasting menu, where the dessert trolley currently includes kirsch ice cream and "the smell" of the Black Forest, certainly requires a big wallet as well as a big stomach as its costs £160 a head: you are warned to set aside four hours to chomp your way through it.

The adventurous chef has not stopped at shaking up restaurant cuisine. In 2008 he tried to improve motorway food by working with Little Chef, where he is still a consultant. Perhaps even more ambitiously, he recently tackled airline food. The resulting in-flight menu included a "high altitude bento box" but the guinea pigs on a British Airways flight were taken aback by his insistence that they clear their noses by spraying a "nasal douche" up each nostril.

If your budget doesn't stretch to the Fat Duck, the other, cheaper option of course is to go to Waitrose, where the experimental chef collaborates on a range of products. A pack of two veal and tartare sauce burgers costs less than £4, putting the cost on a par with a trip to McDonald's. "The Fat Duck has been a 16-year overnight success," joked Blumenthal.